Hot Air Survey: July VP Results

posted at 10:41 am on July 12, 2012 by Patrick Ishmael

For the second survey in a row, Bobby Jindal takes the top spot in the VP preference poll. Marco Rubio again takes second. Paul Ryan moves into third ahead of fourth-place holding Allen West, and Condoleezza Rice holds on to fifth.

Readers are still pretty high on Mitt Romney’s chances.

Here’s how the electoral vote predictions were distributed. 270 would be a Romney win.

Demographics were consistent, as is almost always the case. Representative sample of the readership.

Breaking on Hot Air

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Comments

SCOTUS has had many opportunities to take another look at “natural born”. That they have passed very time, shows that the law on natural born is more settled than Roe. They do look at that one now and again.

They gave us a Robert’s like answer. “That is how the law stands, if you don’t like it its your job to change it”. In this case it will take changing the constitution.

cozmo on July 12, 2012 at 12:25 PM

If you want to stand on law – then you have to explain how 0bama gains citizenship from a non-citizen father, and a mother who was not old enough to convey citizenship, as the laws were written in 1961.

”When one parent was a U.S. citizen and the other a foreign national, the U.S. citizen parent must have resided in the U.S. for a total of 10 years prior to birth of the child with FIVE of the years after the age of 14.”

They will fully overlook the fourteenth amendment and centruries of case law that settled “natural born”. The supreme court validates lower court case law by refusing to take any of these nutball birther cases. Black’s Law Dictionary defines natural born, look it up, it will educate you.

Some quotes I will link to for the Bing/google challenged.

cozmo on July 12, 2012 at 12:03 PM

The 14th Amendment says nothing about natural born. It says that people born here AND subject to the jurisdiction of the US are citizens. Nothing more.

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States …

Seems like judicial cowardice, to me. I just want it adjudicated one way or the other.
cane_loader on July 12, 2012 at 12:33 PM

Sigh
.

For those who don’t want the legalese

cozmo on July 12, 2012 at 12:43 PM

Nice try, but the case you cite fails to address the specific requirement in Article 2 Section 1.

No person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty-five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.

You can try to parse or spin this any way you want, but short of amending the United States Constitution and removing the words “Natural Born” those words have to be taken into consideration. And what that means is very specifically a SCOTUS decision directly referencing the definition of “Natural Born” citizen.

Contrary to what you are implying US v Wong did not do that, what US v Wong did was to establish that the US has a multi-tiered approach to citizenship. Natural Born, Native Born, Naturalized. What US v Wong explicitly does not do is declare Wong to be a “Natural Born” Citizen.

US v Wong declares Wong a Native Born Citizen, having inherited his citizenship through legislation, (The 14th Amendment in this case) rather than from his Citizen parents.

That the Founding Fathers intended the “Natural Born” clause in Article 2 Section 1 to be discriminatory cannot in any way shape or form be argued, as it is clearly there to prevent certain classes of individuals from ever attaining the office of the President of the United States of America.

For instance, it clearly and indisputably bars any Foreign National from holding the office, as it likewise also prohibits any Resident Alien or naturalized citizen from holding the office.

If that were truly the current interpretation of the 14th amendment then Obama could not be president because he would not be a natural born citizen. Somehow I don’t think that’s the current legal interpretation of the 14th amendment.

Correct, but his parents were not American citizens. Therefore, he is not a natural born citizen.

Dante on July 12, 2012 at 1:08 PM

Except that there is absolutely nothing in the law or the Constitution that defines what the term “natural born citizen” means and no governmental agency or court, up to and including the Supreme Court, has ever interpreted it the way you are interpreting. It has always been legally interpreted to mean anyone who was born on United States soil regardless of the citizenship status of their parents. And that interpretation will stand in any and all court challenges. Guaranteed.

Except that there is absolutely nothing in the law or the Constitution that defines what the term “natural born citizen” means and no governmental agency or court, up to and including the Supreme Court, has ever interpreted it the way you are interpreting. It has always been legally interpreted to mean anyone who was born on United States soil regardless of the citizenship status of their parents. And that interpretation will stand in any and all court challenges. Guaranteed.

Shump on July 12, 2012 at 1:24 PM

The Constitution is not a dictionary. You are incorrect in your claim that “it has always been legally interpreted…” The Founders were influenced by many philosophers. It was, after all, the Age of Reason. One of those was Emer de Vattel, a Swiss philosopher who wrote The Law of Nations, an influential work on the Founders and Framers.

Additionally, it was suggested that the president just be a citizen. It was changed to natural born citizen at the urging of John Jay in a letter to George Washington.

Also, you look to law. The law is meaningless. What matters is what the state ratifying conventions believed and what the sovereign people who ratified the Constitution understood its various articles and clauses to mean – as well as how the various clauses and articles were presented to them.

Have to agree that Rubio is light on experience and I question his DREAM act. Not saying he couldn’t be more than he is today but why folks are looking to another first term Senator who’s intent on some form of amnesty to fill the VEEP slot is beyond me.

Have to agree that Rubio is light on experience and I question his DREAM act. Not saying he couldn’t be more than he is today but why folks are looking to another first term Senator who’s intent on some form of amnesty to fill the VEEP slot is beyond me.

LetsBfrank on July 12, 2012 at 2:34 PM

Thanks man, I must admit that I stole the “hispandering” term from someone on here I believe. It stuck and I’ve been using it ever since.

To me he’s alot like Obama. All flash and no substance (like Obama in 2008).

My pick is Rubio due to the need to make people aware of the necessity to reform entitlements. Obama has done nothing but expand them while this would give Romney serious credibility in this area and further add to his strong suit of focusing on the economy. Also Ryan could help us take Wisconsin and maybe even Ohio with some of the connections he has there.

My pick is Rubio due to the need to make people aware of the necessity to reform entitlements. Obama has done nothing but expand them while this would give Romney serious credibility in this area and further add to his strong suit of focusing on the economy. Also Ryan could help us take Wisconsin and maybe even Ohio with some of the connections he has there.

Another parallel between O and Rubio is that so many believe both are great speakers. (I know – O?) Rubio is a good speaker – gives great speeches – but not enough for me. I want to see the action.

I like Jindal, too. One bad speech does not a bad VEEP candidate make! He’s got the experience to match the credentials. I’ll take a boring but authentic speech any day of the week over total B.S. wrapped up in sugar.

See, heres the thing I don’t get, someone likes to discuss eligibility for the highest office in the land. Immediately the insult of birther gets hurled. Yes I consider it an insult. None of you, not one, is a Constitutional lawyer. If you are, please identify yourself and correct me on this. Everyone is entitled to an opinion on the topic, so I am not saying you don’t have a right to that. What I am saying is, as to the best of my ability, the best I can come up with is it is unsettled. Folks have a different take on this from one another. Each person on this thread today has apparently read the same documents. Each has come to a different conclusion. Doesn’t that speak volumes itself to whether or not its a settled issue?

See, heres the thing I don’t get, someone likes to discuss eligibility for the highest office in the land. Immediately the insult of birther gets hurled. Yes I consider it an insult. None of you, not one, is a Constitutional lawyer. If you are, please identify yourself and correct me on this. Everyone is entitled to an opinion on the topic, so I am not saying you don’t have a right to that. What I am saying is, as to the best of my ability, the best I can come up with is it is unsettled. Folks have a different take on this from one another. Each person on this thread today has apparently read the same documents. Each has come to a different conclusion. Doesn’t that speak volumes itself to whether or not its a settled issue?

Bmore on July 12, 2012 at 3:18 PM

The sovereign people who ratified the Constitution were not Constitutional lawyers, either.

The Fourteenth Amendment states that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.” Since Hawaii is part of the United States, even if Barack Obama’s parents were both non-U.S. citizens who hadn’t even set foot in the country until just before he was born, he’d still qualify as a natural-born citizen.

I hate wading into this argument, but nope. The fourteenth amendment defines citizenship, not natural born citizenship, which is a requirement for the Presidency. According to the 14th amendment, Obama, Rubio, and Jindal are citizens. No one is arguing that.

There is a legitimate argument as to what constitutes a natural born citizen. That term has neither been defined nor decided.

The weight of argument and precedent would seem to favor the idea that a child born on U.S. soil should be considered a natural born citizen as well as a citizen, no matter what the status of the parents, but a strong case can be made against.

Dismissing these arguments as the products of deranged and obsessive minds is not helpful.

For those of you who wish to denigrate Vattel, he is, along with Aquinas, Grotius, and Locke, one of the pioneers of Natural Law Theory, which is the tradition out of which our founders wrote the Declaration and the Constitution. Scalia, who is no slouch, quoted Vattel in the first paragraph of his dissent in the Arizona case.

He also worked closely with Blackstone on Law of Nations, which is one of the seminal works on what sovereign powers a Nation State gets, how they are assigned and why they get that way. You would think that mankind creating the exact, same formulation of Nation across all cultures and all time periods, having the same sets of powers and interplay would get some recognition in the modern day. Blackstone contributed knowledge of the English Common Law system and that was built upon the 14th century works of Bracton. If you need to know where the jus gentium comes from within our legal context, then Bracton becomes necessary to read as well.

If you read Adam Smith, you must read Law of Nations as Wealth of Nations fits within it contextually.

de Vattel also pulled together the works that were extant from Grotius and Pufendorf in creating the citizen’s duty inside a Nation.

Really, the Declaration draws heavily on these prior works to the point where you can find in each of them exact sections that Jefferson is paraphrasing and condensing. Each item that Jefferson puts down, not just at the start, but to the infractions and transgressions of the sovereign against her people is in its full form in multiple prior works. Just as he did with the synoptic Bible made for Native Americans, Jefferson synopsizes approximately 3,000 years of knowledge on the Moral Law, Civil Law and Natural Law to give the sweetened, condensed version in the Declaration. With a big editing assist from Franklin… someone had to neaten up things to tell Jefferson that if something is self-evident then just say so and don’t spend a paragraph on talking about it…

Jindal would be a terrible pick. He’s not from a swing state, he’s not a terribly charismatic presence, and he wouldn’t do much towards convincing people to vote for Romney other than those already inclined to do so.

Yeah right. Condaleeza because she has so successfully run for public office and did such a great job under the Bush admin. And Alan West because he’s another one who has shown he’s right for a national general election on the basis of winning a safe GOP Congress seat. And of course both have the resume and talent to just step in to Oval office. I think NOT.

What in Sam Hill are you people thinking? Has the H/A crowd decided to turn Democrap and vote for people to assuage their white guilt?

Hey Dante, give us a name for VP, bro. Come on man, cough up your ideal choice.

We await with clenched anus.

rickyricardo on July 12, 2012 at 4:17 PM

My choice would be a constitutionalist if I were going to vote Republican; however, I am not a Republican and I will not be voting Republican. Even if Thomas Jefferson himself were the VP pick I will not vote for Romney.

Oh yeah, just for the record the 14th amendment is absolutely relevant to the conversation Bmore and I were having since we were talking specifically about the 14th amendment. I have no idea what your were talking about since I don’t read your posts unless directed to me.

I have no idea what your were talking about since I don’t read your posts unless directed to me.

Oldnuke on July 12, 2012 at 4:30 PM

Hold your tongue, you mouth-breathing plebe! Every post by Dante the Great and Powerful are directed to all of us, even those who do not post here! He and He alone decides what is relevant to the discussion!

The nation is so misguided about Jindal. At my first Greater New Orleans Tea Party meeting (in top 10 nationally for education) they were vehemently opposed to Jindal due to Gestapo tactics. He rules through threats, fires any opposition or isolates and targets those that do not tow his line.
He nationally campaigned AGAISNT stimulus funds to the states and then went all over giving out oversizsed checks for photo ops in towns and cities.
Jindal is rarely in the state due to national aspirations.
The education plan he pushed through mandates a curriculum that is objectionable but legislators were intimidated and it passed.
Everything he does is politically motivated and sounds like what most ofo us do not like about our current President.

We don’t know that Cheney didn’t help. He was brought on to fill the void when it came to foreign policy. Believe it or not, it actually made a lot of people feel better about a potential Bush presidency.

Acting congress members and senators should be ineligible to hold that office IMO. But I also think that all federally elected officials should work for privileged alone having already obtained their own financial security in life.

And Alan West because he’s another one who has shown he’s right for a national general election on the basis of winning a safe GOP Congress seat.

MJBrutus on July 12, 2012 at 4:07 PM

Safe district? Truly insane to say that. In 2008 it was already Democratic leaning, even more so in 2012 with the new GOP map:

———————————–
West’s 22nd district, which was already Democratic-leaning, got even tougher under a new GOP redistricting plan released last week. The new district would have gone about 57 percent for President Obama in the 2008 presidential race.
———————————-

Check facts before you spout stupidity. I lived in that district last year, nothing conservative about it.

Rice I do agree with you, she exposed her true colors by voting “for CHANGE” in 2008, most likely will vote for “SAME” this year as well.

You can try to parse or spin this any way you want…
SWalker on July 12, 2012 at 1:16 PM

No parsing, no spinning. I didn’t think you were a goofy nutball birther.

The 14th Amendment is completely irrelevant to this discussion.

Dante on July 12, 2012 at 1:20 PM

You, being birther nutball numero uno are completely irrelevant.

Except to kick around as a birther nutball.

Immediately the insult of birther gets hurled. Yes I consider it an insult. None of you, not one, is a Constitutional lawyer. If you are, please identify yourself and correct me on this.
Bmore on July 12, 2012 at 3:18 PM

I interned for constitutional lawyers who argued before the supreme court and taught con-law on the side for kicks. This was brought up when I interned for them. And took the class. Way before 0bama was elected to anything so politics stayed out of it.

If you want to stand on law – then you have to explain how 0bama gains citizenship from a non-citizen father, and a mother who was not old enough to convey citizenship, as the laws were written in 1961.

cane_loader on July 12, 2012 at 12:41 PM

No I don’t. 0bama was elected and has served. The onus is upon you to prove why 0bama is not eligible. No nutball has succeeded. If you can manage that, you would be a hero…to nutball birthers.